STEVE ALMOND's first story collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, is
just out in paperback. His work has been anthologized in The Pushcart
Prize 2002, Best New Stories from the South 2003, Best of Zoetrope II,
and Best American Erotica. A new nonfiction work about obscure
candy bars will be published in spring 2004 by Algonquin Books. To learn
more about his various preoccupations, check out www.stevenalmond.com.

BLAKE BAILEYs biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty,
was published this summer. The author of a previous book, The Sixties,
he has written for a number of magazines, newspapers, and literary journals.

SHARLA BENEDICT received her M.F.A. from the University of Florida. This
is her first major journal publication. (read Elegy
for the Birdman)

RICHARD BLANCOs City of a Hundred Fires received the 1997
Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is the recipient
of a Bread Loaf Fellowship and a Florida Artist Fellowship. Blancos
work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best
American Poetry 2000, and has also been featured on National Public
Radio. The poem in this issue is from his forthcoming book, Journey
to the Beach of the Dead. A former Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut
State University, Blanco now lives in Washington D.C., where he teaches
at Georgetown and American universities.

GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI is currently a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford
University. She has received numerous awards, including a 2002 Rona Jaffe
Woman Writers Award, a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, and The
Paris Reviews Bernard F. Connors Prize for her poem Circus
Fire, 1944. Her work has recently appeared in Literary Imagination.

VICTORIA CHANGs poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals
such as The Nation, North American Review, DoubleTake, Massachusetts
Review, New Letters, Cream City Review, and Crab Orchard Review.
She is also the editor of the anthology Asian American Poetry: The
Next Generation, due out in 2004 from the University of Illinois Press.
She is currently attending Warren Wilson College in the M.F.A. program
and has received a Bread Loaf Scholarship and a Hopwood Award. She resides
in San Diego.

BROCK CLARKE has published a novel, The Ordinary White Boy, and
a collection of short stories, What We Wont Do, which won
the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. His fiction and nonfiction writings
have appeared or are forthcoming in New Stories from the South, New
England Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Mississippi Review, Five
Points, and elsewhere. He has been a fellow at the Bread Loaf, Sewanee,
and Wesleyan writers conferences, and was a finalist for the 2003 National
Magazine Award in fiction. He teaches creative writing at the University
of Cincinnati.

CHARD DENIORDs poems and essays have appeared recently in The
Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, Witness, The Pushcart Prize XXII
(1998), Best American Poetry 1999, The Iowa Review, Agni, The Harvard
Review, and Ploughshares. He is the author of Asleep in
the Fire (University of Alabama Press, 1990). He teaches English and
creative writing at Providence College and directs the low-residency M.F.A.
writing program at New England College.

DAN DEWEESEs fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Northwest
Review, and New England Review. He teaches writing at Portland
State University in Oregon, and is now at work on his first novel. (read
The Problem of the House)

IAN GANASSIs poetry has been published in numerous literary magazines,
including The Paris Review, Verse, and Ploughshares. New
work appears or is forthcoming in Full Circle, Poetry Motel, The Hat,
and Hotel Amerika. A critical essay will be coming out in American
Letters & Commentary. Excerpts from his Aeneid translation (a
work in progress) have appeared previously in NER.

ANDRE GIDE (1869-1951) was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1947. Among his works are a study of Dostoevsky, novels including
The Counterfeiters, The Immoralist, and Strait is the Gate,
and a celebrated series of journals. The essay in this issue of NER is
taken from Benjamin Ivrys new translation of Judge Not, a
little-known collection of meditations on the law and human motivation
that Gide published when he was sixty.

RACHEL HADAS is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays,
and translations. Her new book of poems, Laws, is forthcoming in
2004. In 2000-2001 she was a Fellow at the New York Public Librarys
Center for Scholars and Writers. She teaches at the Newark campus of Rutgers
University.

BENJAMIN IVRY is the author of biographies of Rimbaud (Absolute Press),
Poulenc (Phaidon), and Ravel (Welcome Rain) as well as a poetry collection,
Paradise for the Portuguese Queen (Orchises). He has translated books
by Gide, Verne, Balthus, and other authors from the French, and in collaboration
with Renata Gorczynski, Adam Zagajewskis poetry collection Canvas
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

DIMITER KENAROV is a senior at Middlebury College. His first collection
of poetry (in Bulgarian) was published in 2001 and won the Bulgarian national
award Southern Spring for best debut by an author under twenty-five.
Currently, he is an intern at The Atlantic Monthly.

DIANE KIRSTEN-MARTIN was born in the Bronx and grew up in Yonkers, New
York, but she has lived in San Francisco since 1976. Her work has been
published in North American Review Review, Third Coast, ZYZZYVA, Crazyhorse,
and Five A.M., among others, and is forthcoming in 32 Poems.
She works as a technical writer and editor in the software industry.

K. A. LONGSTREETs stories have appeared in a number of magazines,
including Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, and New Orleans
Review. One of her new Virginia stories appears in the spring 2003
Virginia Quarterly Review, and another will be published in the
winter issue of Southern Review. She is a recent recipient of the
Lytle Prize from Sewanee Review.

MICHAEL DAVID MADONICK is an associate professor at the University of
Illinois. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, Epoch,
The Florida Review, Tar River Poetry, Quarterly West, and many others.
His book Walking the Deaf Dog was published by Avocet Press.

JANE MULLEN is the author of a collection of stories, A Complicated
Situation (SMU Press, 1998), and her work has appeared in Prairie
Schooner, North American Review, Shenandoah, The Sun, and The Oxford
American, among other journals. She divides her time between Oxford,
Mississippi, and Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland.

SARAH MURPHY is a doctoral candidate in American Literature at Indiana
University.

PATRICK PHILLIPSs poems have appeared recently in Poetry, DoubleTake,
and Ploughshares. His honors include a Discovery/The
Nation Award, the Sjoberg Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian
Foundation, and a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Copenhagen.
His first book, Chattahoochee, is forthcoming from the University
of Arkansas Press.

KEVIN PRUFERs new book, Fallen from a Chariot, will be published
by Carnegie Mellon in 2005. He is also the author of The Finger Bone
(Carnegie Mellon, 2002) and editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.
His poems are in Agni, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry
2003, and the 2002 and 2004 Pushcart Prize anthologies.

MARK SHECHNER is Professor of English at the University of Buffalo. His
forthcoming book, Up Societys Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth,
will be published this fall by the University of Wisconsin Press.

SAID SHIRAZI lives in Princeton, New Jersey. His stories have recently
appeared in Bridge and Juncture, an anthology of new writing
from Soft Skull Press. The story in this issue of NER is dedicated to
Professor Anne Frydman, whose love of Russian literature helped inspire
it.

FLOYD SKLOOTs most recent book is In the Shadow of Memory
(University of Nebraska Press, 2003) which was a Barnes & Noble Discover
Great New Writers selection and a Book Sense 76 recommended title. LSU
Press will publish his fourth collection of poetry, The End of Dreams,
in spring 2005. He lives in Amity, Oregon.

DIANE THIEL is the author of Echolocations (2000), which received
the Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press, and Writing Your
Rhythm (2001). Her work appears in Poetry, The Hudson Review, and
Best American Poetry 1999, and is reprinted in numerous anthologies.
She was a Fulbright Scholar for 2001-2002 and is currently an assistant
professor at the University of New Mexico. Her website is www.dianethiel.net.

J. M. TYREE was a Keasbey Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge University,
where he won the Theological Studies Prize. His work has appeared in the
Oxford/Cambridge May Anthologies (1997, ed. Christopher Reid; 2002, eds.
Andrew Motion and Nick Cave), Radical Society, The Philadelphia Independent,
McSweeney's Internet Tendency (www.mcsweeneys.net), and Osiris. He is
a contributing writer for Isthmus, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.
(read Fanshawe's Ghost)

THEODORE WOROZBYT is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Georgia Council for the Arts, and the Alabama Council
for the Arts. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit
Poetry Journal, Elixir, Green Mountains Review, The Kenyon Review, New
England Review, The North American Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
(read Sadness)